Stitching with Sinar P3

[Dick Roadnight]

I have had a PM asking:

As a P3 owner, could you possibly tell me what options do you have for stitching with this camera?
What type of sliding backs can be used with P3?
Can you rely simply on the camera body shifts and sliding back to have as much freedom as you had with P2 (while shooting panos for stitching)?
I am thinking about P3 / Linhof M679cs for my P45+ and I definitely would like to have the possibility to stitch without too much struggle. Especially if you take into consideration the sensor size, which is kind of puny in comparance with camera frame size

Hi,

I have a Silvestri sliding/stitching back which is badly made and does not focus.
Linhof do a sliding back with a position for the Hasselblad battery, Kapture group do better ones I think.
My P3 was converted from a P2, and has more movements than a standard P3, and yes, you can use camera shift/rise/fall.

6 * 9 has a diagonal of 10.8...  some Apo-digitars can cover more than that, and I would like to combine 3 645s to give something like 24 * 36" at 360 original camera pixels per print inch (on a 7900)... So I would have to use camera movements on the 69 P3 or use a Kapture Group 54 stitching back on a P2 standard.

[Mr. Rib]

http://www.kapturegroup.com/quad/quad.html

Is the quadstitch Kapture group back mountable on P3 ?

[Dick Roadnight]

Kapture Group do a triple stitch, which I think would be useful on a P3 with a 60Mpx back, as you could get about 53 * 90 mm, with plenty of overlap for stitching, giving about 134Mpx, which should be pretty useful for landscapes, without losing pixels or res through distortion.

If they do the quad stitch for the P3, you would not get much advantage over the triple shift except for with smaller sensors... with a 31Mpx 33 * 44mm sensor you could neatly cover the 6*9 cm, but the software might like more overlap for auto-aligning
¿anyone tried it?

With slide and stitch we might not need that much overlap, so a stitching back for a P2 might be a better option: Many of the Apo-digitars do not give enough image circle to use the extra area.

Using camera rise/fall/shift for stitching would work, but, if you use rear fine tilt and then shift to stitch, you would lose focus ... the way round this with a "proper" camera like a Sinar is to use coarse (standard) tilt for perspective, and leave the fine rear tilt at zero. This would not help for horizontal shift-and stitch, unless you turned the camera through 90 degrees.

[Mr. Rib]

Hi again,

In my case the sensor is 37x 49, so a tripe stitch would be around 80 x 49 to avoid problems with stitching software. Well it may be ok, however I'd like to have the extra capabilities of quad stitch adapter for work other than architecture / landscape.
That's what I thought- use the P3 as the arTec- tilt only the front element. However stitching with use of tilt / shift on a large format camera with good focus scares me...  And stitching with an adapter + tilt, that's even more frightening.

[Dick Roadnight]

Hi again,

In my case the sensor is 37x 49, so a tripe stitch would be around 80 x 49 to avoid problems with stitching software. Well it may be ok, however I'd like to have the extra capabilities of quad stitch adapter for work other than architecture / landscape.
That's what I thought- use the P3 as the arTec- tilt only the front element. However stitching with use of tilt / shift on a large format camera with good focus scares me...  And stitching with an adapter + tilt, that's even more frightening.

I am sure you could do 49 *90 with manual alignment.

You could hex stitch, using the triple with rise/fall for the 2nd row!